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Comment by thamer | Hacker News Reader

Betting on whether someone is still alive by a certain date is probably against the rules of this prediction market, but this is a classic way (read: academic) to implement a hitman service with some level of safety between the participants (victim excluded).

All you need to do is bet a large amount of money that the target will still be alive by a certain date. Then someone takes you up on it, makes them have an accident and you just lose a bet – nothing more. You didn't discuss hiring a hitman, you've never even met a hitman: you're just placing bets online.

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IDK if academic is the right term, but market manipulation is definitely the nerdiest way of hiring a hitman.

We could take this up a notch by making the bet (person A dies by date X, $100) tradeable. Maybe also create a derivatives market. Now we have a hitman market and a bodyguard market.

Derivatives have several beneficial effects. One is uncertainty, which should stimulate a diversity of contracts: dead by X, $100; dead by Y, $105. People love arbitrage. The second benefit of a two sided market is naked short sellers.

Best case scenario, naked short selling creates an infinite supply of tradeable hitman contracts. In theory, demand is always finite but as Keynes famously said... "no one f#&k-ng knows how demand works!"

So eventually... Robin Hood adds every person on earth to their murder exchange and the market singles out a random person for $gme status. Her name in Ana and next friday, $6 billion of her murder contracts expire. Half the mercenaries on earth are trying to kill her. The other half are her personal army.

Someone must have written a great book with that kind of a plot. Does anyone know such book?

'The Insurance Man' by Zadie Smith & Neil Gaiman

This book doesn't seem to exist on Google. Got a link?

There is one with that title by Timothy Squire, that has a close plot. Is that the one you are talking about?

They're making a joke.

Damn I really wanted to read that book. The plot is extremely interesting.

The trouble is, anyone can bet against the person remaining alive, so it becomes a public goods problem. Everyone's incentive is to let someone else do the assassination, and freeload. There's no extra profit in actually doing the hit, but a lot of extra risk.

>anyone can bet against the person remaining alive

Yeah, but it is 1. risky ( if the person stays alive you just lose money ). and 2. the incentive for a potential hitman is reduced by your bet ( so by placing the bet you are actually reducing your odds of success ).

So to increase your odds of surviving you can bet on your own death. That seems strangely philosophical to me. Another upside is, if you should die anyway, then at least you win the bet!

It's like life insurance that decreases your chance of death.

Knowing with certainty that the event will happen can lead to additional profit by being willing to accept less than fair odds or to increase leverage.

This is half clever, but taking up the other side of that bet in a public market would immediately make you a person of interest to law enforcement.

While not literally an assassination market, the souljahboy story demonstrates the site creates them: a player can use direct action to force an outcome to occur, rather than predict it as intended. For tweets, its silly. But what if someone sabotaged the vaccine distribution, for instance? There does seem to be room here for unintended and quite unfortuante outcomes.

How about someone sells a whole bunch of credit default swaps on some really risky asset backed securities and takes the proceeds and pays off the loans so default is impossible.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124468148614104619

But isn't a bet on a prediction market open to anyone? Unless the assassin took the bet and killed the target moments before the deadline, couldn't a casual observer jump in on the action after they learned of the target's death?

Who'd be willing to take the other side of that bet at that point?

Sympathetic magic

A large enough bet is basically a voodoo doll into which you've just stuck a pin.

I could see a judge sending you to prison for this all the same.

They have markets on whether Biden, Cuomo, and Gaetz will still be in office as of various dates. You could pretty cheaply buy shares that pay off $1M+ if Biden were to die. But I'd expect the cost of assassination to be well over that amount by orders of magnitude plus you'd need to run forever.

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